"Thirty Days hath September..."
by Sharon Archer
'Thirty Days hath September
April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty-one
Save February all alone,
Which has twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine each leap year'
April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty-one
Save February all alone,
Which has twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine each leap year'
Handy old rhyme, isn’t it? The only tricky part is February and leap years - right?
Wrong!
Did you know that in 1752, September only had 19 days?
To understand why, we need to go back to Rome…
In 45 BC, Julius Caesar reformed the Roman Calendar giving us the foundation of the one we use today. But his model was too long by eleven minutes per year. Doesn’t sound much, does it? But these insignificant minutes accumulated over the centuries.
By 1582, the spring equinox no longer fell on the 25 of March but earlier on the eleventh of that month.
Pope Gregory XIII issued a Papal Bull correcting this by decreeing the 5th of October, in the year 1582, to be the 15th. This brought the equinox back to March 21st.
To stop the problem occurring again, he calculated the century years should not be leap years unless they were divisible by 400. Thus 2000 was a leap year, as was 1600. The years 1700, 1800 and 1900, although divisible by four, were not leap years.
Roman Catholic countries, for example, Spain, France and Italy, changed to the Gregorian Calendar in 1582.
In England, it was nearly another two hundred years passed before the modified calendar was introduced.
Remember Henry VIII? He solved his marital difficulties by breaking with the Papacy in the 1530’s and declaring himself the head of the Church. Those elusive minutes kept accumulating until, in 1752, eleven days had to be dropped from the calendar to bring it into line with the Gregorian model.
The correction was made in September of 1752, when the date jumped from the 2nd to the 14th. Believing they’d been robbed, angry mobs of people rioted in the streets shouting “Give us back our eleven days!”
I came across a tiny hint of this date anomaly when I was doing genealogy and couldn't resist researching it further. We take the calendar and our methods of measuring time for granted... but it hasn't always been straightforward!
So tell me, did you know this? And if you did, how had you come across it?
I couldn't resist an excuse to give away a copy of The Man Behind The Badge!
PS: I raided one of Mr Gadget's other boxes for all these watches... okay I confess three of them are mine! :)
